Exclusive: Amazon's New Hotel Business Begins to Take Shape
Skift Take
And so it begins. Amazon is experimenting and grasping for new ways to makes its mark in the hotel business. The new effort, which rolled out in the last couple of weeks, has been in the works at least since last Fall. It is modest at this point but no one knows where it is heading.
Amazon has begun to broaden the way it works with hotels using the precise business model that Skift reported in November that it would.
In the past couple of weeks Amazon Local updated its iOS and Android apps and began on-boarding a handful of independent hotels offering their rooms at published rates, which is a big departure from the steeply discounted, distressed inventory that has been the mainstay of Amazon Local over the past couple of years.
That's important because Amazon is trying to give hotels the flexibility to work with Amazon on an ongoing basis and not just when they have rooms to sell at 40 percent or 52 percent cheaper than published rates when the hotels are feeling the pinch.
You can expect Amazon to continue to explore ways to expand the boundaries of its hotel business, and to seek to find a different value proposition for hotels and consumers than the rest of the pack.
Bringing Hotels On Board
Among the hotels that have loaded their published rates, availability and photos through the Amazon Local extranet over the last week or plan to do so in the coming days are sister properties Ledges Hotel and The Settlers Inn in Hawley, Pennsylvania, as well a
